And it isn’t a piece of political propaganda designed to swing the election, as some conservatives suggest.

It’s a strange amalgam of behind-the-scenes imagining, video simulations, archival footage and patriotic odes to the military regarding a rather recent event.

Producer Nicholas Chartier (“The Hurt Locker”) teamed with the Weinstein Company to deliver this strangely compelling blur of fact and dramatized truth. Director John Stockwell (“Into the Blue”) claims the origins of the film were not political. “Producer and financier Chartier is French and decidedly apolitical,” Stockwell wrote in the production notes.

The film premieres Sunday on National Geographic Channel, locally 6-8 p.m. Netflix subscribers will have access to “SEAL Team Six” the day after it airs.

The election-eve timing is controversial. Obama haters will cringe at the heroics credited to the president, as the film replays speeches in which Obama promises to find the al-Qaeda leader.

Stockwell notes that Mitt Romney, Joe Biden and Secretary of State Robert Gates all opposed the raid, suggesting it wasn’t worth the risk and the billions of dollars required. The film details the potentially disastrous outcomes that could have been Obama’s equivalent of Jimmy Carter’s failed hostage rescue attempt in Iran, a political disaster.

Red or blue, viewers can agree the election-eve timing is curious. It’s the first original film for National Geographic Channel, slated a few weeks before ” Zero Dark Thirty,” another film about the raid by “Hurt Locker” director Kathryn Bigelow.

“SEAL Team Six” begins as the U.S. learns the name of an al-Qaeda functionary. But how? Questions arise immediately. Did that successful Guantanamo interrogation really happen because the operative colorfully explained potential torture tactics, as the film suggests? Was it the least violent interrogation in the history of interrogations? We’ll never know.

From there to the launch of the mission into the fortified bin Laden compound, the film amps the tension at every step.

Dramatic music. Zooming maps. Condensed time, quick cuts and bold edits. No telling how much is Hollywood, how much is the Pentagon and how much is from the memories of unnamed individuals who were part of the effort.

“The events portrayed in the film were vetted by a team of experts, including a recently retired Navy SEAL, a top CIA operative and one of the most renowned bin Laden historians,” the producers note. “While some aspects of the characterizations have been dramatized for creative reasons, the core story is an accurate portrayal of an event that ended one of the longest manhunts in American history.”

We know how it ends, but to see the action unfold as drama is still suspenseful. Footage of President Obama at the White House Correspondents Dinner in Washington is intercut with scenes of actors playing SEALS strapping on gear. The graphic reads “18 hours until the raid” and the countdown begins. As drama, the film suffers from the over-use of video and computer images. Yet simulated surveillance videos make the tale seem all too real.

A handful of characters carrries the story forward, while factions splinter over the risks.

Kathleen Robertson (“Boss”) plays CIA analyst Vivian Hollins, who narrates in a documentary-style interview. Once the CIA geolocated the courier’s cellphone, in August 2010, Hollins says, “we immediately put two assets on the ground in Peshawar.”

The CIA is portrayed as being even more high-tech than in “Homeland.” In this vetted film, agents use tablets, uplinks from cars, cutting-edge surveillance for facial-feature matching, super aerial surveillance and more.

Again, the truth may be more haphazard, more riddled with bureaucratic snags and altogether less slick. But this movie is about heroism. And as such, it succeeds in telling a national success story.

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